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3 weeks ago | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Tobias Carroll |Mandana Chaffa |Rebecca Hussey |Alina Stefanescu
From Schaffner Press | The Lives and Deaths of Véronique Bangoura by Tierno Monénembo, translated from the French by Ryan Chamberlain | Fiction | 240 pages | ISBN 9781639640591 | US$17.95 What the publisher says: “In this gripping novel set in both French Guinea and Paris, award-winning author (The King of Kahel) Tierno Monénembo explores themes of international exile, sexual abuse, generational trauma, and repressed memory of a people and country under the regime of dictator Sekou Toure from...
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1 month ago | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Tobias Carroll |Mandana Chaffa |Rebecca Hussey |Alina Stefanescu
Now in its third year, the National Book Critics Circle’s Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize celebrates a thrilling span of books, across genres, languages, countries of origin, and publishers. During the course of 2024, our panel—a combination of member critics and several board members—deliberated over hundreds of books, resulting in the following shortlist. It’s an honor to present our judges’ appreciations for our six finalists.
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May 30, 2024 | 
identitytheory.com | Alina Stefanescu
In late August of 2023, as late summer heat pooled mirages over the asphalt, I spoke to poet Lynn Emanuel over Zoom about her recent collection Transcript of the Disappearance: Exact and Diminishing (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023). Across numerous poetry collections, publications, and anthologies, Emanuel's lifework has been literature.
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Apr 2, 2024 | 
themarkaz.org | Alina Stefanescu
Romanian American poet Alina Stefanescu describes her new book Dor and present the poems “Playing Possum” and “My Polish Child.” As Emily Holland writes, “DOR is a compendium of desire, displacement, longing, and belonging. While the word ‘dor’ itself ‘serves as a bridge which creates its own territory from fusion,’ here Stefanescu’s words do their own act of bridging the spaces between the body and language.”Alina StefanescuPlaying PossumThis is my mother, newly-dead, Mom says.
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Mar 21, 2024 | 
alinastefanescuwriter.com | Alina Stefanescu
“ At the recollection of a name, all the characters return with their costumes and their language to play their roles as they played them life and I can see them performing their actions in front of me like a God entertaining himself by gazing at the worlds he has created.
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Mar 4, 2024 | 
pleiadesmag.com | Alina Stefanescu
By Alina StefanescuMaya Jewell Zeller. Out Takes/ Glove Box. New American Press. November 2023. $18“& something not wedded”: A reading of Maya Jewell Zeller’s Out Takes/ Glove BoxICatullus may have written an apostrophe to his boat, but Maya Jewell Zeller has written a book of poems that sinks every vessel inside it – a book that refuses to float in its proper slot in the port of poetics. She doesn’t pretend otherwise.
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Feb 29, 2024 | 
clereviewofbooks.com | Alina Stefanescu
“To describe how the world is organized may be the same as organizing the world.” —Robert Glück, “Long Note on New Narrative” (2004)“Ed is the dreamer, and you can't look squarely enough at his face to speak of possession.” —Robert Glück, About Ed (2023)1. Following their first night together, as the sun poured through the window, Ed Aulerich-Sugai recounted his dreams to Robert Glück.
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Feb 28, 2024 | 
alinastefanescuwriter.com | Alina Stefanescu
Wherein she attempts to dump a bit of her recent obsession with yellow onto a screen—-for you, whoever you are. To begin with gratitude for other writers, particularly peers in poetry and music, who drew me deeper into this poem last night. To begin with the shape of it—The figure of the poem on the field; the way it occupies space. Four stanzas of different length. Or: three stanzas and an addendum; a trinity with a scrap left on the cutting floor of creation.
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Jan 22, 2024 | 
alinastefanescuwriter.com | Alina Stefanescu
It was lovely to hear Stephanie Burt and Kamran Javadizadeh discuss the relationship between popular music and poetry on Close Reading podcast this morning. Although this (blurry) distinction — and history— comes up in the poetry and music workshop I’m teaching, I’m not sure hard lines can be drawn between the song lyric and the poem. That said, thinking about the text as a medium, considering (and taking seriously) the visual component of the page, leads me to Leonard Cohen.
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Jan 5, 2024 | 
alinastefanescuwriter.com | Alina Stefanescu
Spellbound by Platonov’s Chevengur, in this illustrious translation by the Chandlers (whose end-notes are an arcade of marvels to my eyes). It’s a book about love, hope, eschatology, history, and humans who feel called to extraordinary power. The accordion is one of its secrets. pic.twitter.com/N6PtZiAyMf— Alina Stefanescu (@aliner) November 14, 2023 Chevengur by Andrei Platonov (NYRB Classics) Translated from the Russian by Elizabeth Chandler and Robert Chandler.
